Motivational Quotes

Music

There is two kinds of music the good and bad. I play the good kind.

- Armstrong, Louis

Best Quotes about Music

Music is well said to be the speech of angels; in fact, nothing among the utterances allowed to man is felt to be so divine. It brings us near to the infinite.

Carlyle, Thomas

Difficult do you call it, Sir? I wish it were impossible.

Johnson, Samuel

I know only two tunes. One them is Yankee Doodle and the other isn't.

Grant, Ulysses S.

I resent performing for frisking idiots who don't know anything.

Lennon, John

Nothing separates the generations more than music. By the time a child is eight or nine, he has developed a passion for his own music that is even stronger than his passions for procrastination and weird clothes.

Cosby, Bill

True music must repeat the thought and inspirations of the people and the time. My people are Americans and my time is today.

Gershwin, George

There is something suspicious about music, gentlemen. I insist that she is, by her nature, equivocal. I shall not be going too far in saying at once that she is politically suspect.

Mann, Thomas

If music be the food of love, play on; give me excess of it, that, surfeiting, the appetite may sicken, and so die.

William Shakespeare

Of course the music is a great difficulty. You see, if one plays good music, people don't listen, and if one plays bad music people don't talk.

Wilde, Oscar

10.

Music is the vernacular of the human soul.

Latham, Geoffrey

11.

People compose for many reasons: to become immortal; because the pianoforte happens to be open; because they want to become a millionaire; because of the praise of friends; because they have looked into a pair of beautiful eyes; for no reason whatsoever.

Schumann, Robert

12.

Music can name the unnamable and communicate the unknowable.

Duffecy, James

13.

Since music is a language with some meaning at least for the immense majority of mankind, although only a tiny minority of people are capable of formulating a meaning in it, and since it is the only language with the contradictory attributes of being at once intelligible and untranslatable, the musical creator is a being comparable to the gods, and music itself the supreme mystery of the science of man, a mystery that all the various disciplines come up against and which holds the key to their progress.

Levi-Strauss, Claude

14.

Give me a laundry list and I'll set it to music.

Rossini, Gioacchino Antonio

15.

Music and woman I cannot but give way to, whatever my business is.

Pepys, Samuel

16.

Classical music is the kind we keep thinking will turn into a tune.

Kin Hubbard

17.

When Mozart was composing at the end of the eighteenth century, the city of Vienna was so quiet that fire alarms could be given verbally, by a shouting watchman mounted on top of St. Stefan's Cathedral. In twentieth-century society, the noise level is such that it keeps knocking our bodies out of tune and out of their natural rhythms. This ever-increasing assault of sound upon our ears, minds, and bodies adds to the stress load of civilized beings trying to live in a highly complex environment.

Halpern, Steven

18.

There are two golden rules for an orchestra: start together and finish together. The public doesn't give a damn what goes on in between.

Beecham, Sir Thomas

19.

Hearing often-times the still, sad music of humanity, nor harsh nor grating, though of ample power to chasten and subdue.

Wordsworth, William

20.

I can't listen to that much Wagner. I start getting the urge to conquer Poland.

Woody Allen

21.

I think music in itself is healing. It's an explosive expression of humanity. It's something we are all touched by. No matter what culture we're from, everyone loves music.

Joel, Billy

22.

Take a music bath once or twice a week for a few seasons, and you will find that it is to the soul what the water bath is to the body.

Oliver Wendell Holmes

23.

Hell is full of musical amateurs.

George Bernard Shaw

24.

The trouble with music appreciation in general is that people are taught to have too much respect for music; they should be taught to love it instead.

Stravinsky, Igor

25.

There is two kinds of music the good and bad. I play the good kind.

Armstrong, Louis

26.

It is from the blues that all that may be called American music derives it most distinctive characteristics.

Johnson, James Weldon

27.

A woman's two cents worth is worth two cents in the music business.

Lynn, Loretta

28.

My heart, which is so full to overflowing, has often been solaced and refreshed by music when sick and weary.

Martin Luther

29.

I don't mind what language an opera is sung in so long as it is a language I don't understand.

Sir Edward Appleton

30.

Hell is full of musical amateurs: music is the brandy of the damned.

George Bernard Shaw

31.

When griping grief the heart doth wound, and doleful dumps the mind opresses, then music, with her silver sound, with speedy help doth lend redress.

William Shakespeare

32.

Music like religion, unconditionally brings in its train all the moral virtues to the heart it enters, even though that heart is not in the least worthy.

Jean Baptiste Montegut

33.

The musical emotion springs precisely from the fact that at each moment the composer withholds or adds more or less than the listener anticipates on the basis of a pattern that he thinks he can guess, but that he is incapable of wholly divining. If the composer withholds more than we anticipate, we experience a delicious falling sensation; we feel we have been torn from a stable point on the musical ladder and thrust into the void. When the composer withholds less, the opposite occurs: he forces us to perform gymnastic exercises more skillful than our own.

Levi-Strauss, Claude

34.

The way to write American music is simple. All you have to do is be an American and then write any kind of music you wish.

Virgil Thomson

35.

Music expresses that which can not be said and on which it is impossible to be silent

Hugo, Victor

36.

All my concerts had no sounds in them; they were completely silent. People had to make up their own music in their minds!

Yoko Ono

37.

Music is the only language in which you cannot say a mean or sarcastic thing.

John Erskine

38.

Jazz came to America three hundred years ago in chains.

Whiteman, Paul

39.

Music is the key to the female heart.

Seume, Johann G.

40.

She was one of those people who said I don't know anything about music, but I know what I like.

Beerbohm, Sir Max

41.

It is cruel, you know, that music should be so beautiful. It has the beauty of loneliness and of pain: of strength and freedom. The beauty of disappointment and never-satisfied love. The cruel beauty of nature, and everlasting beauty of monotony.

Britten, Benjamin

42.

Music is spiritual. The music business is not.

Morrison, Van

43.

Don't play what's there, play what's not there.

Davis, Miles

44.

An intellectual snob is someone who can listen to the William Tell Overture and not think of The Lone Ranger.

Dan Rather

45.

Music should never be harmless.

Robertson, Robbie

46.

I think everyone should have a Beatles phase in their life. I think it's part of growing up in the Western world.

Jadelr and Cristina Cordova

47.

A good composer is slowly discovered a bad composer is slowly found out.

Newman, Ernest

48.

It's a marvelous feeling when someone says I want to do this song of yours because they've connected to it. That's what I'm after.

Carpenter, Mary Chapin

49.

You don't need any brains to listen to music.

Pavarotti, Luciano

50.

If you develop an ear for sounds that are musical it is like developing an ego. You begin to refuse sounds that are not musical and that way cut yourself off from a good deal of experience.

John Cage